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Managing banner ads in corporate emails behind IT’s back

I recently came up with a small marketing hack, which lets the Marketing department run and switch ad campaigns in emails without the help of IT. Nothing too complicated (or ominous, as the title might suggest) – some marketers out there may already be doing it. But it saves a lot of time, resources and gives marketers a little more freedom to get creative.

In previous articles I discussed the support for images and setting up server-level email signatures on Exchange or Office 365. If you give them a read, you will realize that to modify any aspect of organization-wide email signatures you have to get your system administrator to apply the changes you want directly on the server. Not a very efficient method, obviously. However, when it comes to banners and other images, it is possible to limit your sysadmin’s involvement to only 1 action. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Design the body of your HTML email signature template.

The banner or image you use has to be hosted online and inserted via the HTML <IMG> tag. For the purpose of this particular hack, you have to use a web server, which allows for substituting the image file with a different one with the same filename.

You can hyperlink the image by putting an <A HREF> tag around the <IMG> tag.

Remember that some popular email platforms (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365) come with personalization capabilities. Use variables such as %%FirstName%%, %%LastName%%, etc. to have users’ personal information automatically pulled into their signatures.

2. Ask your sysadmin to deploy the template in your organization.

3. When it’s time for a new banner campaign (or any other image like e.g. a new logo), just prepare the new image, give its file the same name and extension you used in the <IMG> tag in step 1 and upload it to the web server.

IMPORTANT: Make sure that the resulting image URL matches the one you used in your email signature template in step 1.

That’s all. No more inter-departmental tasks, endless email exchanges and waiting weeks for email banners to be changed.

Hyperlinks in email signatures rotated behind IT’s back

It’s not possible to skip IT in modifying a URL that has already been included in an email signature HTML template. This leaves only imperfect workarounds such as: creating a marketing campaign blog with a static URL, maintaining a dedicated landing page with rotating content, or setting up a mock URL with temporary redirects to rotating marketing campaign sites.

Email signature management software for marketers

To extend your direct control over organization-wide email signatures to aspects other than banners/images you have to use dedicated software.